George Bailey is my father.
During the best days of the economy, I saw my father more than once offer to personally guide and explain to his clients, mostly middle-class hard working Americans, how to refinance and consolidate their debts, and plan for the future.
More than once as a child, a client of his would emerge from his conference room, notice the resemblance in our faces and say, “Your father is a great man.” One man was so grateful for closing a loan no one else could that saved his livelihood, that he left my father a huge chunk of his estate: nearly two dozen properties in Jersey. Dad would relinquish (without profit) nearly all of them saying, “I did not earn these.”
Another time a carpenter working my basement would come up to me, with tears in his eyes and said, “Your paapi worked so hard to help my family. I won’t let him down working on your home.” He didn’t.
And there a dozens of more stories of clients, of employees, of complete strangers, who called my father the most kind businessman they ever knew. And would ask me, “please don’t let him down.”
My father often spent more time ensuring customer service and satisfaction than he did at home with his kids.
More than 3 times a week, he’d work late hours by himself, correcting forms and triple-checking loan packages for his employees, so that they could be home for dinner with their families.
Then in 2007, the economy crashed.
While our bills and debts piled up, my father kept his idle employees gainfully employed for months, so they could make their mortgages and afford their children’s educations. When he caught an employee cheating him during this time, my father refused to fire him–citing that if he did, his employee’s children and wife would be the ones to suffer, and that would be unIslamic of my father to cause.
Even now, with my family going through so much in the doldrums of our economic recession, my father works into the night not just make ends meet, but to make sure those clients of his don’t lose their homes.
He feels morally responsible to do so, just like George Bailey did. Because he knows these people. And because he’s an American: we always try to do the right thing.
While I never tell him this (and he never reads my blog), this video makes me think of him, and how on the worst days, he made sure his staff, clients, and their families were taken care of, because he knew what it meant to be a responsible businessman. My father is an American hero for all the right reasons, and he’s a small business owner.
Dear Congress: Help Main Street. We’re the Real America.
